# Movie Reviews



## Butterfree (Aug 22, 2009)

So yeah, I'm writing reviews of all the Pokémon movies. Any thoughts or questions about the project in general, the reviews up so far, suggestions for modifications?


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## Karkat Vantas (Aug 22, 2009)

They're great, but you're expecting too much from them.

Mewtwo isn't going wild and going all "hye guyz im teh greatest trainer evah nobody can beet me cuz im so evil" because he has a twisted morality. He's doing it for the sake of a plot device so Ash can come to the island and such. It's like how Ash doesn't keep his Pikachu unevolved because Pikachu doesn't want to, but because if he did evolve, the anime would lose their cute exploitable mascot.

I'd try to add on to what was bad/good about the film, but that's about it.


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## Butterfree (Aug 22, 2009)

First movie review said:
			
		

> Also, yes, I am overanalyzing it severely. That's part of the fun.


I don't believe in deciding characters shouldn't be considered as _characters_ because "it's a kids' movie so they're not supposed to have any depth". I _like_ analyzing characters. I don't give a damn if the author didn't think it that far. :P

Though honestly I also think most people don't give the first movie enough credit. It _is_ about Mewtwo's struggle to accept being an experiment, a "copy", and he _does_ think he can validate himself by being stronger than Mew, which is obviously pretty confused and messed up; this is made pretty explicit if you bother to watch the movie and listen to what he says. I made up the details of how this underlying motive can explain his behavior during the actual movie after Ash comes in, but Mewtwo is still clearly _not_ just your average shallow must-rule-the-world cartoon villain, which they could easily have made him if they'd wanted to.

The Pokémon movies are pretty weird in that they can have initial concepts that aren't half bad, even if they then proceed to get butchered in order to fit Ash into it all.


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## spaekle (Aug 22, 2009)

I like reading over-analysis like this. Making what is on the surface a shallow children's fantasy movie into something much more complex is always a good time; especially when you have cases like Mewtwo and Lawrence, where they _could_ have been amazing characters but ended up as little more than a thing for Ash to run yelling at. :(

I don't really see anything wrong with the reviews; the summaries are pretty tl;dr-able if you've actually seen the movie, but you warned of that beforehand, and the fact that you interject little opinions and observations makes them readable. I'm curious to read what you have to say about the other movies, in any event. :V


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## #1 bro (Aug 28, 2009)

The reviews seem to be almost entirely made up of long, tl;dr synopses of the movies in question. To me this seems slightly pointless. What is your intention in writing these reviews, to tell fans which movies they should watch and which they shouldn't bother with, or to simply share your own perspective? Either way, summarizing the entire movie in detail is pointless, in the first case, you're spoiling the plot, in the second case, the fans would most likely only get something out of the review having already seen the movie. 

And, of course, like I know others have stated, looking for deep psychological symbolism in a pokemon moving is like looking for deep psychological symbolism on the back of a cereal box.


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## ultraviolet (Aug 28, 2009)

I think it's worth adding a short summary in a review for two reasons: for people like me, who haven't seen the first movie in years and have forgotten much of the plot and secondly, it is _really _difficult to write about a text without spoiling the plot. Considering that the first Pokemon movie was released aons ago I don't really think it's that big of a problem (most pokemon fans have seen it, haven't they?). 
Anyway, I really enjoyed reading this, Butterfree. c: I'd probably be more looking forward to more reviews if I had seen any of the other Pokemon movies, though.


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## Butterfree (Aug 28, 2009)

The reviews are mostly meant for those who have already seen the movies in question, but that was probably a long time ago when they probably didn't think much about what they were watching. Describing the events of the movie is both necessary for my rather in-depth commentary to be properly understood by anyone who hasn't just come back from watching it and simply a large part of the fun - the synopses are where I get to make a running commentary on what's going on in proper context with the rest of the film with my interpretations of events. What comes after the synopses are just summaries of how it all plays together to provide a clearer view of how the movie works as a whole. The reviews would be very uninteresting if I cut out the synopses and just kept the good/bad and conclusion parts. I'm not a film critic trying to tell people whether a Pokémon movie is worth watching (which would be kind of pointless, since generally, people either watch the movies or they don't, rather than specifically choosing to watch only those movies they hear are comparatively good). If they did want to know that, they could just skip right down to the conclusion and maybe read the whole review later after they've seen it. The very reason I'm doing the reviews to begin with is to make them extremely in-depth and actually discuss the intricacies of the plot of the movie, and there would be no way to do that if I were trying not to spoil the movie for people in the process or if I had to rely on people remembering every detail from whenever they might have watched it.


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## Yarnchu (Aug 28, 2009)

Sweet the Voice of the Forest review is up. I'll go ahead and read it.

I actually find it interesting that the 3rd movie ended up being better than the 1st and 2nd movies, but then again they were executed rather poorly.

Whoo! Post 1,111! *shot*


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## Butterfree (Aug 28, 2009)

Eh, I really don't think the Pokémon movies show much of any sign of the ordinary sort of sequel decay. :/ When people view it that way, they're generally viewing the first movies through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. The quality of the movies is very up and down and has been that way from the beginning, with no real steady general decline or improvement over time. Which makes sense, considering what sort of a franchise Pokémon is. Generally sequelitis comes about because the first installment exhausted the original plot potential that the universe and characters were designed around, but the Pokémon franchise is based on first and foremost a universe in which pretty much any plot can then be made to happen. The only real recurring element of all the movies is Ash and company, and since the Pokémon movies have never been actually based around them, they're just made to stumble in on whatever conflict the writers cooked up (with varying results depending on how believably Ash can save the day). Well, okay, and it always involves legendary Pokémon in some form, but those are always different and (usually) given different roles in the plot of the movie.


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## PokeNinja (Aug 28, 2009)

Butterfree said:


> The only real recurring element of all the movies is Ash and company, and since the Pokémon movies have never been actually based around them, they're just made to stumble in on whatever conflict the writers cooked up (with varying results depending on how believably Ash can save the day). Well, okay, and it always involves legendary Pokémon in some form, but those are always different and (usually) given different roles in the plot of the movie.


By "conflict" I hope you mean the somewhat-stereotyped villains the writers throw in there along with the problem...


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## Butterfree (Aug 28, 2009)

"Conflict", as a literary term, means the disagreement (in a loose sense) that forms the basis of a plot. That would generally mean the villains too, yes, although there I was mostly referring to the _main_ conflict, and the human villains do not always have anything to do with the main conflict (see the second movie: the main conflict is the birds' longing to fight versus the world's interest in stopping them).


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## Flora (Aug 29, 2009)

I've only read through the first review and half of the second, but what I've read is pretty good.

Though I was told that Ash actually _did_ die in the Japanese version instead of simply being turned to stone, and that it was edited for the dub.  I guess that isn't the case?


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## Yarnchu (Aug 29, 2009)

Techincally speaking, he did die in both versions. They just toned down the dialouge for the English release.

And I figured I made myself look stupid when I posted that. I wasn't talking about sequel decay or anything, but rather refering to how most of the movies are bad when viewed critically.


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## Butterfree (Aug 29, 2009)

Well, is a person dead when they've been turned to stone? Ash clearly is turned to stone in both versions, and the only dialogue between his petrification and revival is Mewtwo incredulously wondering if he really thought a human could stop the battle, Pikachu and the other Pokémon being all sad, and Misty whispering "Pikachu..." in the Japanese version but "Please no..." in the English version. Nobody is going "Oh, no! Ash died!" and nobody at any point makes any sort of comment on exactly what happened to Ash. If anything, Misty thinking what happened to him is something worth "please no"ing about means the English version implies him _more_ to be dead.

The Japanese version is not as much DARKER AND EDGIER as people like to think. That thing about Butterfree dying after mating? Not true either; it's a serious mistranslation some random fan made up. The Japanese version is frequently a bit more complex, with the dub dumbing it down (e.g. Mewtwo's motivations, Sammy being Oak), but it doesn't have death and sex all over the place, for Christ's sake.


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## Yarnchu (Aug 29, 2009)

Butterfree said:


> Well, is a person dead when they've been turned to stone? Ash clearly is turned to stone in both versions.


Well, yes. You have no pulse, no heart beat, your brain isn't functioning, you aren't breathing...no signs of life.



> The Japanese version is not as much DARKER AND EDGIER as people like to think. That thing about Butterfree dying after mating? Not true either; it's a serious mistranslation some random fan made up. The Japanese version is frequently a bit more complex, with the dub dumbing it down (e.g. Mewtwo's motivations, Sammy being Oak), but it doesn't have death and sex all over the place, for Christ's sake.


And I never said this. Not once. All I did say was that I thought the dub had changed the dialouge to make it more kid friendly.


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## Butterfree (Aug 29, 2009)

> Well, yes. You have no pulse, no heart beat, your brain isn't functioning, you aren't breathing...no signs of life.


The same applies to some hibernation, and yet it would be difficult to consider that truly synonymous with death. There is also the issue that fictional portrayals of petrification have a tendency to be a lot more easily reversible than actual death as portrayed in the same works. Whether it makes sense or not, realistically speaking, it can easily be argued that Ash isn't truly _dead_, and there is no dialogue in either version to confirm the matter in either direction.



> And I never said this. Not once. All I did say was that I thought the dub had changed the dialouge to make it more kid friendly.


When did I ever say you said that? It was a general comment on the persistent belief of the fandom that the Japanese version of Pokémon is somehow all dark and full of death. If I was talking to anybody, it was more to Flora and Ashes, though you did also propagate the idea that the Japanese version made him explicitly dead. Though you shouldn't really go around correcting people if you don't actually know for sure yourself. :/


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## Flora (Aug 30, 2009)

Ah, okay, that cleared it up.

We watched that movie quite recently and my sister made that remark, and it kinda confused me. *shrugs*


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## Seritinajii (Aug 31, 2009)

Are you going to do this for the specials, too? It might be interesting.


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## Butterfree (Sep 1, 2009)

Eh, well, I'd like to review the Raikou special just to spread the unending love for it, and I guess I'd like to at least see Mewtwo Returns, but seeing as according to Serebii.net there are 23 specials in all, most of them don't sound very remarkable and it seems like it would be kind of hard to justify making a distinction between those I feel like reviewing and those I don't, I should probably stick to the actual movies. :/


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## Karkat Vantas (Sep 2, 2009)

Well, the Deoxys movie is next. Personally, I thought it was one of the better ones, but I don't know if that's a shared opinion.


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## Autumn (Sep 2, 2009)

Kam said:


> Well, the Deoxys movie is next. Personally, I thought it was one of the better ones, but I don't know if that's a shared opinion.


I actually thought it was one of the better ones, too. Haven't seen it in a while, though.


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## Butterfree (Sep 2, 2009)

Kam said:


> Well, the Deoxys movie is next. Personally, I thought it was one of the better ones, but I don't know if that's a shared opinion.


Really? Everything I've heard seems to be that it's one of the worst. But well, I'm about to find out. :P


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## Karkat Vantas (Sep 3, 2009)

It's twoards the higher end of the spectrum. Not the best, but it's still pretty good.

And that Munchlax was freaking awesome.


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## Yarnchu (Sep 3, 2009)

Kam said:


> It's twoards the higher end of the spectrum. Not the best, but it's still pretty good.
> 
> And that Munchlax was freaking awesome.


Munchlax used deus ex machina! It's Super Effective!

Nice review of the Jirachi movie. I never really thought about the fake Groundon in that light. Though some of your complaints are really a matter of Fridge Logic(but you pointed that out anyways).


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## Karkat Vantas (Sep 3, 2009)

But it was an _awesome_ deus ex machina!

And Munchlax is cool, anyway.


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## Shiny Grimer (Sep 5, 2009)

Have you thought about reviewing the Pikachu shorts? I love those, and they used to be part of the main feature as well. They have some plot and are pretty cute in general.


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## Butterfree (Sep 5, 2009)

Well, that would first require me to somehow obtain all of _them_, and even if they have a plot in some sense, they're not long or complex enough to allow for much of the kind of entertaining overanalysis and dissection I'm doing this for. I'd have rather little of worth to say.


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